Today’s blog post summarizes how BISAM collaborated with the performance team and their front office counterparts at a large global insurance firm to deliver a robust performance and attribution platform for complex data management, performance measurement, reporting and multi-asset attribution. The resulting solution enabled the performance team and portfolio managers to evaluate and enhance their investment strategies, while maintaining high levels of security, transparency, process control and operational scale.

This month's B-One Implementation Success Story looks at the collaborative effort that led this European asset manager to significantly reduce report delivery time and fully eliminate the need for manual post-production reports editing.

After becoming GIPS certified, this mid-sized asset manager turned to BISAM for an enriched reporting solution to slash their reporting time while simultaneously producing precise and in-depth attribution reports.

In a recent blog post by Morgan Housel of the Collaborative Fund, The Most Overlooked Trait of Investing Success, I was struck by this particular comment: “The most overlooked trait of investing success is communicating to your clients the softer and emotional side of investing. A knowledge of market history. An acceptance of volatility as a normal part of investing. That you can be wrong on half your investments and still do well over time.”

Meeting the needs of institutional clients is of course a key focus for asset management organizations, and those needs are becoming more sophisticated and more challenging. The reporting model between asset managers and their institutional clients used to be a ‘standardized push’ model in which clients were given whatever information their managers could provide, when they could provide it, and in the format that they could provide. That’s all changed. Today’s reporting model is a ‘customized pull’ model, with the clients dictating what should be delivered, when and how.

In recent posts, Sean Murray, BISAM’s Director of Product Strategy, has outlined the correlations between investment performance and manager compensation, the tensions of that dynamic, and the related efficiencies that firms can realize from B-One for measuring and reporting manager results. This week Sean and I further discussed his ideas and the Manager Reporting use case for the BISAM B-One Performance and Attribution system. If you’d like to join our discussion, please share your comments at the end of this post.

This is the first in a series of monthly case studies that highlight some of BISAM’s recent B-One implementation projects. Our Professional Services team have selected the success stories that they think best demonstrate BISAM’s commitment to innovation and customer collaboration.

It is well known that the GIPS Standards were designed to provide transparency to investors across investment managers - to effectively create an apples-to-apples mechanism for understanding performance and uncovering talent. When GIPS launched, they were a regionally focused set of optional rules that were quickly adopted on a global scale. In short order, they became a competitive advantage to those firms who chose to follow, and allowed investment management firms to attract customers. A formal GIPS Verification process soon followed and helped the cause even further - to engender trust amongst investors in a given firm’s results and help the investor decide to whom their business is awarded.